Sunday, 30 December 2012

In the last few years,
Africa’s biggest literary prize, The Nigeria Prize for Literature, sponsored by
Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas company, has consistently reinvented itself to
meet the yearnings of writers and critics alike. From opening up the prize to
Nigerians in the Diaspora and making the judges known to the public, the prize
organisers have shown they are open to ideas and criticisms aimed at improving
the prize.

Last week in Lagos at Southern Sun Hotel, Ikoyi, Lagos, the
governing board and company officials met with a section of the literary
community and art writers with the aim of injecting new ideas into the prize.

It was a robust session that touched on a wide range of
ideas and issues around the prestigious prize and how to make it better so that
writers can maximally benefit from it. While some wanted the $100,000 (one
hundred thousand dollars) prize money to be split amongst the four genres of
literature – prose fiction, poetry, drama and children literature so that each
genre receives $25,000, others want the present status retained and would not
entertain the idea of having the $100,000 shared amongst four writers. The
latter group argued that the current size of the prize money ensured
credibility and prestige, which splitting it would erode.

Perhaps, those who argued for the prize money split feared
that Diaspora writers might consistently win the prize (the last two editions
since opening up the prize to Nigerians outside the country have been won by
them – Esiaba Irobi won two years ago (Cemetery Road) and this year, Chika Unigwe won with On Black
Sisters’ Street). This was so, it was
argued, because the quality of books Diaspora writers submit, which are better
edited, with quality printing and packaging. But those on the other side of the
divide charged local writers to up their game in these critical areas where
there are noticeable deficiencies so they could compete with their colleagues
residing abroad.

Also, LNG was charged to help expand the country’s literary
landscape by investing in schemes that enhance quality writing. With an
educational system that has remained poor, the quality of writing has since dropped
to the extent that most of the entries submitted for the prize are not worth
considering. Such schemes like workshop and training for book editors and even
creative writing for writers, it was argued, should be undertaken by the gas
company to improve quality.

Bakare, whose Farafina imprint created a revolution in
fiction publishing in the country in the last 20 years, amplified the fears of
those who routed for a prize split, saying, “As it is, the prize will always be
won by outsiders (Nigerians residing and writing abroad). There is no industry
in the book sector at the moment; it’s just the passion for book people have
that is driving the book business”.

Besides, Kan also argued that Nigerians abroad winning the
prize would only serve to enhance the profile of the prize and make it truly
global in character. He urged local publishers to step up their act and meet
the prize standards, which are known to be very high.

Proponents of this scheme argued that there should be
developmental aspect to the prize, in which Nigeria Academy of Letters (NAL)
could collaborate with the sponsor to train writers, editors and other allied
skills and talents to sustain the vision of the prize. They noted that while it
was good to give the lump prize to one individual, the prize would also be
better served if the winner didn’t just vanish into thin air soon after.

They stated that part of the post-winning should be for
developmental purposes, as a device, scheme to always keep the prize on the
consciousness of the public. But those opposed said one-off prize-winners were
not unusual the world over and indicated many such writers that went into
oblivion shortly after winning various prizes.

But consultant Obe stated that it was not the business of
the sponsor, a gas company, to get involved in the training of talents in
writing or editing. He urged NAL to either approach LNG for such sponsorship or
other organisations to source funds for such trainings. Although he
acknowledged the necessity for such training to take place, he couldn’t be sure
if such burden should be passed onto LNG, which he said was concerned with
giving the prize to the best writer to emerge from the scene.

But Omatseye lamented the near absence of companies
interested in promoting literature through sponsorship and called on corporate
organisations to look the way of literature with adequate sponsorship.

Ezeigbo opined that too much burden should not be put on LNG
alone to solve all the problems of Nigerian literature and tasked literary
promoters to seek other avenues of sponsorship for the training of writers and
editors. She then commended two state governors, Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State
and Muazu Babangida Aliu of Niger State for supporting literature through their
annual Garden City Literary Festival and Muazu Babangida Aliu Literary
Colloquium respectively. She tasked other state governors to emulate them so as
to broaden the literary space to accommodate more talents.

Obe also canvassed for more crusades amongst literary
promoters across the country to get more people with resources involved in
promoting literature. He charged art writers, newspapers and magazines to open
up more literary spaces in the media so as to engage the consciousness of
Nigerians to the good literature could do to liberate and elevate their minds.
However, his plea also met with the constraints arts pages currently face, as
they become the first casualties of advert placements that keep constricting
them daily.

For Mbanefo, the rot in the writing input seen in the poor
entries submitted for the prize was a reflection of the rot in the educational
system. He stated that there was not much LNG could do to redress such anomaly
unless there was a holistic approach to salvage Nigeria’s educational system.
He restated the company’s faith in the prize board for upholding excellence
since its inception, saying the company would do all it could to sustain the
prize and make it a showpiece for Nigerian writers.

Banjo expressed happiness at the meeting and the robustness
and objectivity in the ideas and criticisms expressed from those in attendance.
He said the concern of his board was for the prize to command the respect it
truly deserves, noting that opening up the prize for Nigerians abroad was meant
to spur local writers to do more to win it

He revealed that from henceforth, a consultant from outside
the country would be brought in to complement judges’ efforts, when the final
three writers would have been announced and shortlisted. He said this would
give the prize both international status and enhanced credibility, so as to
obviate the notion of ‘ghetto’ judges (made up mostly university professors)
from some quarters. Integrating non-university professors among the judges is
about the only idea yet to be assimilated into the prize regime.

Banjo also announced the Critical Essay Prize worth N1
million for a critical essay or review of a Nigerian literary work, but which
must be published in a known international journal, as further boost for Nigerian
literature.

Activist poet, Odia Ofeimun has been waxing strong on the
theatrical turf, with his poetic dance drama, in which he stages one piece
after another month after month for free to Nigerian theatre-goers. His dance
showpieces include A Feast of Return, Nigeria the
Beautiful
and Itoya, a Dance for Africa, which started when he wrote Under African
Skies
in the 1990s in London on commission. The heated political era of the military
era ensured the pieces remained under lock and key. But since the return to
democracy, especially after seeing South Africa’s dance drama Umoja brought to Nigeria to
celebrate Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s birthday, Ofeimun felt challenged and promptly
approached the godfather of Lagos State politics for a chance to show off his
stuff. Since then, Ofeimun has not looked back, as he did so again three days
ago on Christmas Eve. Here, Ofeimun gives background to his interest in poetic
dance drama pieces and the void they are intended to fill in Africa’s seeming
historical amnesia

How
it all began

I
found myself in Britain researching a fragment of Nigerian history, and people
who got to know that there was a Nigerian poet in Britain got me involved in
readings. Before I knew what was happening I was being invited to write a story
that would go with an exhibition of linocuts by a Namibian artist. He provided
the mural that backed the Mandela’s concert when he came out of prison. So, I
simply decided that I was going to do a poem to go with each of the
linocuts.When the exhibition
opened I had enough poems to go with the paintings; my poems were placed side
by side with the paintings.

It was a very new experience for me
because it was like being commissioned to write a poem; you had to write a
poem. And somehow the interest I had in Oxford at that time centred on ‘Matching
Myth and Mythology to History’. So, it wasn’t very difficult for me to do. When you
look at the poems in Under African Skies, you will see some of these, how the poems and
the linocuts matched.

Now, once I did that for the
Museum of Modern Arts in Oxford, somebody remembered it in London when they
were planning an African intervention in the celebration of 500 years of
Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World.

We were the discovered and they needed
us to respond to their celebration and how they discovered us. So, I needed to
do something. There was a dance drama already sponsored by the Arts Council of
Great Britain, and it was led by a Ghanaian choreographer named George. But it
was the artistic director who approached me, a Briton; he asked me to help them
do something. I did not want to write a story or an essay; I decided to write a
series of poems fashioned in such a way that, over a period of1 hour 20 minutes,
you would have images that tell you about Africa up to the point of
anti-Apartheid struggle. It was like telling them the story of Africa from the
beginning of time to the present. But there was no way you could do that in one
hour twenty minutes.

So, I decided to pick images that are
significant for understanding the way Africans live. That was how Under
African Skies
was produced. First, they visited Africa, video-taped a lot of dances and songs
and took the best dancers in Africa to Britain to dance. One good thing about
it was that when you choreograph dances, the rough edges are smoothened out.
What I had to do was to watch these video tapes from across Africa; it was only
after watching the dances that I picked out the images that I would use, and
arranged the images in such a way that the images rearranged the dances. I
arranged the images in such a way that the anti-Apartheid struggle would be the
last.

So, you see the totality of African
history of slavery and the role of mothers and fathers and things like that
until you got to the independent struggles and the anti-Apartheid struggles.

Well, I always told people
that it was just a touristic literary performance; you needed to entertain the
average European, who needed to know something about Africa. It was just a
touristic advertisement. But then, my director, Felix Okolo does not agree with
me. As a director, Okolo actually thinks that is the source from which we can
understand how the other dance dramas are going. For him, all the issues that
all the other dance dramas are engaging are actually in Under African Skies in different ways.

The South Africa story in the Nigerian story

WE
were supposed to do a dance drama every year. I then decided to do the story of
Southern Africa because Mandela was out of jail, from Shaka Zulu to Mandela’s
release. This means that I had to dig into my understanding of South African
history from as early as possible. Many South Africans were surprised. Some
wondered what a bloody Nigerian was doing writing a South African story. The
thing is that during the anti-Apartheid struggle, South Africans were part of
the Nigerian story, and Nigerians took South African writers and events in
South Africa seriously. So, as a reader of South African history and
literature, I had a fairly good grasp of the stories of South Africa; and I had
that story in a way that was coloured by my understanding of Nigerian life.

So that when I had to produce A
Feast of Return
based on the South African experience, I was responding to events in South
Africa with an eye on the way the Nigerian story had been going. If you go
through A Feast of Return, one of the surprises is that when you use Nigerian
dances, the stories are almost Nigerian. But the pattern was not intended. I
genuinely followed South Africa’s history, taking all the issues step by step
until we arrived at Mandela’s release.

On a close look, you find that
almost every African country followed the same pattern. It’s like taking Achebe
from the pre-colonial to the colonial, the post-colonial, the military, and
hopefully, the supposed freedom that followed it.

It was a very excited business for me,
and I use the word ‘business’ advisedly, because when you are living in a
country where you don’t have a work permit, and you’re given opportunity to
earn a living, oh, it’s fun; and it was fun for me.

I had to leave Oxford for London to watch the dances, and as
I watched the dances, I reworked the poems. So that when you’re watching the
dances, you’re actually following the motion of the poems. I figured it out in
the form of folklores where the dead ancestors returned to the public square to
tell you stories of how they once lived. So that A Feast of Return is a return of ancestors and
those who had gone; this time, those who had gone also happened to be the
gorilla fighters who were returning home after Mandela had been released. It
was about South African exiles returning; so that the ancestors and the exiles
and the gorillas were all now returning to tell their stories.

BUT
when I returned to Nigeria, I needed to do them the way I thought they should
be done. In London, it was a 40-man troupe and there was no chance here that I
would be able to raise that kind of money to do that in Nigeria. And there was
no theatre that would sponsor it or allow it to run for a long time enough to
make the money back. So, I simply let it go. I knew that someday in the future
some occasion would arise.

From 1993 when I returned to
1999, I simply didn’t bother about it.

But I lost my manuscripts to Gen. Sani
Abacha’s raid of TheNews magazine. I had to rework most of it from memory.

How I got back to the dance
dramas is because democracy came.

On one occasion, Ahmed
Tinubu’s friends brought South Africa’s Umoja. I watched Umoja and I could see that I have a
better story of South Africa’s struggle than any South African dance drama I
had seen. And I could not see how I could let it happen under my very eyes
without protesting. So, I went to Tinubu and said, ‘It was good; I watched it.
But with one fifth of that money, I can do you a better dance drama’. And I
convinced him I had done it in Britain and I could do it in Nigeria.

Why Okoloas director of all the dance drama?

ON
the evening that Nadine Gordimer was passing through Lagos to
South Africa, we took her to Jazzhole to do a reading. Okolo met me there and
insisted I give him any of my dance drama pieces. I agreed without thinking
about it because I already knew Okolo’s work. Of the directors in Nigeria,
Okolo is the most adventurous and he participated and related to all the other
directors in the country more than any other director. Generally, Okolo was so
much in the centre of the way drama was going in Nigeria, that he was the only
one I could consider good enough to beat the people in London.

Apart from the fact that Okolo is not
just a director, there is nothing that happens on stage that Okolo is not a
master of – whether it’s the lighting business, costuming, set design, name it
– he’s the only director I know who has a thoroughly comprehensive and
encyclopaedic view of stage in this country, and almost all others recognise
that in him. And since Okolo is not good at talking; I mean, he does not
discuss his art the way other people do; he would rather you come to the
theatre and see what he has done.

Okolo has a very adventurous mind in
relation to the theatre and he knows no other life. The life Okolo knows is the
theatre. He will not participate in any other thing. What concerns Okolo is how
to make things appear on stage. He’s a professional who is not afraid to
identify with his profession. Okolo would use his own money to make a play go
right.

Unfortunately, I don’t have
the kind of money that can allow Okolo’s flight of fancies to work the way he
wants. If we had a proper National Theatre, Okolo is the man to invite to put
up for you a drama on a national occasion because he would do it in a manner
that is beyond the average director. He has the luck of doing theatre workshops
all over the world and how they work. And he related with all the big directors
in Nigeria – whether it’s Soyinka, Adelugba, Osofisan – whether as an actor, a
dancer or a director at all the levels.

In my view, he has done very well.
We’ve managed to work very well without rough tackles. He’s interested in how
the stage works.

Why
I wrote for the theatre

We
set out believing we could just do a one-week of Festival of Dance Drama. Now,
I always wanted to write for the theatre, but there were things I wanted to do
as a poet if I were to write for the stage. I hadn’t done them by the time I
started writing dance drama in Britain. My ambition was to write for the stage
after doing certain poems, some of which I have still not done; they are long
poems. But once I chose to write dance drama, it still slightly changed the
picture because I realised that there are many approaches to the stage and that
you could make the poems come alive. How to make that happen I learnt by
writing along those linocuts in London.

The spirit of a commission can
actually be applied to poetry in a way that broadens the audience.

Instead of just reading to an audience
in Britain, I allowed others read with me by allocating lines to them,
preferably to female readers. And I noticed it worked very well as drama.

I remember writing a play at
age 17 on Oba Ovonramwen but lost it to termites in a
wooden box; it weaned me from the idea of writing a play ever since.

Unique
historical features of the dance drama

I went to Britain to research
Nigerian history and I had to read about Nigeria and Africa as much as possible
in order not to miss the historical import of the job I had gone there to do.
And so when I started what to write for the stage, I also ran into people, who
were worried that Africans did not know their histories enough. And by the
nature of fictional performances, the history is deemed to be displaced in
favour of the pleasure principle so that you can devalue the historical content
in order to make it more pleasure reading. I did not want to do that; I wanted
to take on history rudely as history comes in order to show that there are
lessons we can learn which are not just of fictional nature, and which are
still directly relevant to the way we were living our lives.

Many people do not know the history of
their countries and usually can’t engage the most significant issues. At
surface level, we all appear to know what happened. But when you start engaging
people in terms of their grasp of the questions that require answers, you find
that they are lost.

What I set out to do was
partly to guide the way we look at our history.

In the case of Under
African Skies,
it was a very nationalistic project; I needed for Africans living in Europe at
that time to have a sense of where we were actually coming and to see how,
because of certain decisions we took or did not take, we were between the kinds
of schisms and the historical defaults that were becoming staples in our way of
life.

Under African Skies was bouncing off Europe as a
way of granting integrity for the way Africans lived before they intervened and
thereafter. As a way of showing that a form of creativity is possible in our
lives, which can ward off the devilries of the Trans-Saharan and Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trades and prepare us for genuine self-governance.

Those were the critical issues
for me and to show that there is a way you can re-interpret the myths and
folklores of traditional societies so they become relevant in the modern scheme
of things.

On the historical side, you will find
that history is not being taught in Nigeria today because our leaders are
afraid that we will discover how they ruined our societies; they fear we will
begin to demand answers… My play fills this historical void foistered on us by
a visionless leadership; you need to see the three dance drama - A Feast of
return, Nigeria the Beautiful and Itoya, a Dance for Africa – to believe.

Sunday, 23 December 2012

ONE
of Africa’s foremost thinkers of the 21st century, the Nobel laureate Prof.
Wole Soyinka, even at age 77, has continued to play the role of an elder in the
house who would not allow the goat suffer birth pangs in tethers. And so the
eminent African patriot and global intellectual has continued to point out the
way for his wayward continent men and women, who appear perpetually lost in the
woods of world civilization.

His latest critical book of essays, Harmattan
Haze on an African Spring, gives insight into the man’s pains when he looks at
his beloved continent that has been a subject of all sorts of appellations from
outsiders simply because those running the continent have consistently failed
to do the needful to change its colour from dark to light.

Essentially, the book offers a new
reading and rendering of the continent, the choices made or not made, the road
taken or not taken and new visions for the future. And at the presentation on
Tuesday at Terra Kulture, Victoria Island, Lagos, Soyinka in company of some
leading intellectuals from divergent fields of business, political economy,
education, the arts, public service and journalism, sat down to examine a
contentious continent lying prostrate and stagnant in the sun, seemingly
refusing to yield to every entreaty to stand up and stride along like the
others.

The interrogarors of contents of the
book and state of Africa were former Minister of Education and World Bank
senior official, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, Dr. Kanyiolu Ajayi, who moderated the
session, Director, Lagos Business School, Prof. Pat Utomi and, former Group MD
of UBA Africa, and now president of HEIRS Foundation,Mr. Tony Elumelu.

Their role was to examine the book in
the light of Africa’s poor development index and respond to some of the issues
Soyinka raised concerning the continent’s retarded growth in spite of its huge
material and human resources.

Indeed, the book also speaks to the
outsider looking at Africa from certain jaundiced, racist views; questioning
why such perception still persists after many years of independence from
colonial rule.

SOYINKA's
latest work also examines Africa’s spirituality; holding it up as a fresh
ground yet to be explored and exploited to solve Africa’s many intractable
problems, especially religious conflicts that are foreign imports to the
continent.

Soyinka categorically argues that in African
religions lies the alternative balm needed to heal a continent with many
festering wounds.

While using scientific interplay of the
ideas of gravity and motion and their impact on human societies and where
Africa fits in relation to its many complexities, Soyinka pointed out two
observable obstacles to the contradictions that characterise the continent and
its lack of development namely, the twin evils of slavery and colonialism,
which he said constitute obstacles to overcome for the continent to move
forward. “Africa needs to contend with those two in terms of resistance with
the poor leadership, corruption, irredentism,” he said. “These are two
monumental obstacles to which African leaders have failed to respond; two
obstacles to organic development. African leaders have failed to overcome these
two evils.”

He cited the failed attempts at
Nigeria’s elections and census enumeration since independence as colonial
legacies the country was yet overcome, saying, “This country is the most
notorious in falsifying elections and census results, because it’s a surrogate
country of the British, with the residual effects and control of the two
obstacles”. He, however, argued that overtime the country ought to have
overcome these twin evils if there had been visionary leaders. He asked
rhetorically, “Is it not about time we transcended these two by visionary
leadership?”

For the iconic literary artist,
“Africa’s unexplored geographical resources are capable of propelling society
forward, but a total, atavistic, retrogression has overtaken us, with the path
not taken has continued to plague us to this day”. He said the Japanese and
Chinese, “By hanging onto their traditional beliefs, clinging to their
traditional core, and refusing to be alienated from their philosophies and ways
of life, have managed to bring about development. Cling to what was indigenous
to their societies is what has transformed their societies”.

Prof. Soyinka wondered how people from
the miserable, frozen wasteland called Britain managed to hold vast kingdoms
all over the world and render them ungovernable several years after they left
and planted surrogate nation-states, like Nigeria, India, with her vast
architectural grandeur as seen in the Tajmahal!

He expressed his abiding faith in the
ability of Nigerians to accomplish great things that are capable of causing
phenomenal transformation, as evidences of the people's immense abilities,
which abound all over the world, but that such need to be harnessed -- and
that's the only missing ingredient.

“Nigerians can create a Silicon Valley
in Nigeria,” he enthused ruefully, “but it’s about the leadership. Nigeria has
got the brainpower. The possibilities have always been there. Perhaps, we
should take the example of China and draw the bamboo curtain and shut ourselves
up from the rest of the world and also go by Mbonu Ojike’s ‘boycott all the
bycottables’ and then see what we can do by ourselves!”

In the event where drawing the curtain
is not possible, he called for regionalism as solution to Nigeria’s problems of
development, noting, “I have been pushing for a recognition of a rapid,
competitive development of regional governments in Nigeria” to solve our
developmental problems.

On his invocation of the abiku, Soyinka said it
should only be taken metaphorically, saying pouring libation as stated in the
book meant regeneration, continuity, as there is a need to recollect where a
people were coming from, just as Africa’s recognition of the existence of the
dead, the living and the unborn in a continuum.

The abiku, he said
represents everything about existence, from living to death and as a possible
way of coping and that what comes out of the future should be about
advancement.

Soyinka also called for a revisit of
local religions as balm to the distrust and disruptions foreign religions have
brought to Africa. He labelled the twin foreign religions Christianity and
Islam as having been turned into weapons of mass destruction. He noted that all
religions are man’s creation and asked “Christians and Muslims to go to the Orishas and be wise!”

WHILE
congratulating Soyinka for writing the book, Ezekwesili said Harmattan Haze
on an African Spring offers insight into the choices, especially economic
individuals that have been made and how those choices have impacted on the
collective on the continent. She said while the book looks at why Africa still
remained undeveloped, the question that had to be asked is, “What is the
essence of the human being? Is there a process of development for Africa that
we missed as originally conceived? Who determines the success or
successionisaton of their views of development to be so difficult? And who is
that person that defines the context for that development?”

Ezekwesili also stated that in parts of
the West, there is the pervasive view that Africa is lacking all the essential
ingredients for development, with the likelihood that the future would continue
to be bleak, as development would never happen. She also noted there are yet
others who were paternalistic about Africa’s problems and couch their
expressions the faintest optimism that Africa would somehow crawl from its
prostrate position and somehow arrive at its own Eldorado some day in terms of
the developmental attainments that all the other continents have attained but
which seem a mirage for Africa at the moment.

The former Education Minister stated
that Soyinka’s book is such that will force readers to re-examine the
continent’s developmental issues again, whether the lack of development is as a
result of alienation of the individual from his African roots.

Ezekwesili also argued that
development essentially takes the individualistic curve and the choices the
individual makes. She cited the Singapore example as a people who had a certain
mindset at independence to prove to the 'whiteman' that there was no reason for
the whiteman to have governed them in the first place since they were capable
of doing it themselves. And so they worked at it and today, Singapore is a
model country for development.

She reasoned that what happened after
Nigeria’s independence was that while places like Singapore had a developmental
model in mind, Nigeria had a replacement strategy. All the leaders were
concerned with was to replace the departing British with all the
exploitativeness of colonisers without a vision for future.

She also argued that what Africa was
exploiting and exploring in terms of its vast natural resources was a tiny bit
of what lie beneath the landmass of the continent. She said the peoples have
failed to really dig deep to unearth the resources their lands harb our.

According to her, only 16 African
countries have attained full school enrolment while many others have not been
able to transcend the barest level, adding, “Development in Africa is a great
opportunity. There are so many possibilities that lie within. Inability to
fully exploit these opportunities carries the seeds of implosion. A steady
state of failures causes people to find alternative ways of survival otherwise,
the spiral down the slope.

Also, Ezekwesili debunked the abiku myth as worth
looking at, and said Africa accounted for 500 infant deaths out of 1000 births.
She noted that such grim statistics made mockery of any inspiration derivable
from the abiku metaphor because Africa’s growth lies in its virile
population, which such monumental deaths imperil.

Ezekwesili then concluded, “A single
description of Africa is intellectual slothfulness” the West has perpetuated
against the continent, a proposition Soyinka disproves in his book.

ON
Africa’s spirituality as encapsulated in Soyinka’s famous poem ‘Abiku’ (the spirit child
that is born and dies to be reborn again and again to torment the parents) as
fitting metaphor for examining the recurring retrogression plaguing most part
of Africa, Prof. Utomi, founder of the Lagos Business School and the Pan
African University, said although Africa’s spirituality is dynamic, it is easy
to link the colonial experience and how things were done in Nigeria. He said
Nigeria’s woes stemmed from inability to deal with the consequences of
individual actions, saying, “The problem of living in Nigeria is that of living
with bad consequences”.

He argued that while Africa’s young
population has deep technology penetration, the problem is how to harness that
penetration to give momentum for real development. He noted that 2012 has been
a bit of a paradox, and added that his “fears had been how to pluck failure
from the jaws of progress. We are still managing ourselves poorly and we may
not be able to derive much from the Africa Rising momentum that is gathering.
He cited the instance of Rwanda that has managed to raise itself from the dust
of a tragic war as a place Nigeria should emulate. He said after the tragic
war, there was a consciousness of ‘never again’ attitude and Rwanda was the
better for it today, as the country is steadily making giant strides in
development, managing its resources prudently for the benefit of its people.

For Utomi, while Nigeria’s problems are
traceable to leadership, there are other indicators to watch out for as
impediments to growth namely, value problem, collapse of culture and
institutions. He said there is nothing Singapore did that Nigeria hasn’t done,
yet the gap between the two is still wide because the discipline to ensure
values, culture and institutions work has been lacking.

For astute banker Elumelu, Nigeria is
full of critics, who ceaselessly bash the country senseless without lifting a
hand to help. He urged Nigerians to begin cultivating the healing habit of
saying good things about their country. “We criticise ourselves too much,” he
said. “How do we say good things about ourselves to the rest of the world? If
all we see and say about ourselves is the bad, how do we want others to say
about us? We must begin to use our human capital to propel development.”

WHILE
contributing from the floor, poet and social critic Odia Ofeimun brought an
ominous dimension to the debate, when he said Africa is exactly where it was
when the slavers from Arab and Europe came calling from the north and south
centuries ago, with several acrimonies and internal wrangling going on all over
the continent. He said the implication is that Africa will not be able to
defend itself again a second time and fall prey to the superior powers of
others who are more organised and developed. He said the continent is still
plagued with distrust.

Ofeimun lamented, “Today, we are not
building factories and farms for the people to work on. Our problem is about
not building factories. We should begin to demand from those asking for our
votes, which imported goods they will stop when they get to office so that our
factories can begin to work again for the people to be engaged and idle hands
put to proper use and not otherwise”.

Art collector Yemisi Shyllon argued
that until African societies go back to their traditional cultures to
rediscover themselves and what is innate to them as proposed by Soyinka, the
continent would not experience growth.

Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi wondered why Soyinka
has suddenly turned essayist as against the fine satirist he was known for in
his many plays and poems, wondering also whether fiction didn’t quite solve the
problems his society posed and whether it was a submission that fiction -- the
arts -- has failed him as a tool to confront society.

To this Soyinka responded that art has
not failed the society, rather it has helped to contnualy propel the society
towars self-examination and the quest for renewal and revalidation.

Other contributors included Prof. Bimpe
Aboyade, eminent librarian and, wife of the late famous economist and economic
theorist, Prof. Ojetunde Aboyade, who is reputed to have written one of the
economic blueprints that the Malaysians adopted to change the fortune of the
country. Prof. Aboyade advised that Africans, even as they embraced forewign
religions, must indeed go back and recover some of the positive values of their
culture and deploy such to help in their march to greatness, especially in the
context of globalisation.

THE
night was also suffused with musical entertainment by the young poet, dancer
and singer, Aduke and her friends; and generous wining and snacking. The
literary feasting continued well into the night with an informal reception in
the restaurant of the Terra Kulture.

Their reputation is built on solid group achievement,
to paraphrase Chinua Achebe in his iconic novel, Things Fall Apart. Now, People’s World is quietly taking a strategic part in this year’s
Calabar Christmas Carnival. The group has seen carnivals, has brought carnivals
into life and has been part of Europe’s biggest street carnival, the Notting
Hill Carnival, London. With its Peoples World Carnival Band in Tottenham part
of London, the group has been part of stage costume-making and many other
community events in the U.K. and elsewhere.

The
group arrived Nigeria last week and will provide costumes for the lead participants
of Calabar Christmas Carnival. It is in the country in partnership with
Nigeria’s stage lighting and decor giant, the Alhaji Teju Kareem-led Zmirage
Multimedia Company Ltd, to give the carnival and its numerous visitors an
unforgettable time. For Kareem, the Zmirage boss, this collaboration with
Peoples World Carnival Band is also part of his yearly International Cultural
Exchange (ICE) programme in honour of Prof. Wole Soyinka’s humanistic
contributions to the world.

As part
of the partnership, Peoples World had worked with Zmirage months ago at the
Nothing Hill Carnival to expose and sell Calabar Christmas Carnival to the rest
of the world when a big float was mounted to advertise the carnival.

Now,
both parties will be providing Calabar Christmas Carnival with something
everyone can share, the rich experience of giving carnivals a meaning quite
apart from the usual razzmatazz, fun, gaiety and pomp carnivals supposedly
generate. With a membership largely made up of Africans from the Caribbean
Islands, Peoples World sees carnivals as street theatres, which are not only
celebratory, but provide opportunity for some form of self-expression for the
people in articulating their vision of the world.

So for
them, a carnival should go beyond the mere display of beautiful costumes and
colours. It should hold up an aspect of the people’s culture, even their
grievances and joys and tell unique stories about how things really are, where
things are headed, and possibly how to get whatever destinations the people are
headed. Largely coming from carnival backgrounds steeped in street protests
that characterised slave-master relationships in the Caribbean Islands of years
gone by, Peoples World frowns at carnivals that do not have underlying tones
that speak to the people’s daily living conditions and how to better improve
such conditions for their better living.

Indeed,
this is where the group disagrees with the spirit of the Rio De Janeiro
Carnival in Brazil, where the display of naked flesh seems the pervading
intent. With Nigeria’s follow-follow­, bandwagon effect that has resulted in carnival explosions in recent
years in some states, with the Abuja Carnival jamboree leading the way in poor
programming conception and cultural/artistic contenxtualisation almost
bordering on meaninglessness, the involvement of Peoples World in this year’s
Calabar Christmas Carnival may just be the turning point carnival organisers
need to redirect their efforts so that carnivals being organised in the country
can have impact in the people’s lives.

For
Peoples World, carnivals should embrace the totality of a people’s existence
and give them a voice to speak to authority and to themselves about their
conditions.

INTERESTINGLY, the recently concluded CARNIRIV, with ‘Reminiscing
the Past, Consolidating the Future’
as theme, and organised by the Rivers State Government, may just have done well
as it accommodated many elements into its agenda, including a symposium or
colloquium that addressed many socio-cultural issues that affect the people and
perhaps how to move along on the path of cultural promotion and value
edification.

Last weekend, The Guardian sought furthwer explanation on members of the Peopls World on their
idea of carnival, and coming to lend their expertese to carnivals in Nigeria.
Excerpts

Angela Duncan-Thomson

FOR me, coming to Nigeria for the first time is quite
an experience and a way to portray an art form that I’m passionate about and to
work for the first time as a new company and we’re hoping to make an impact for
the carnival in Calabar. You know, everybody has a different opinion about
coming to Nigeria. On my first day in Lagos, we got caught up in the traffic on
our way to the museum. But it felt like home, like Jamaica, where I’m from.
What I found was that people’s temperaments are pretty similar; and my friends
agreed that it was all familiar – the way people drive, the way they argue – it
just felt as if I was home, which to me was very important.

My
mission here is to bring costumes for the Master Blaster band that is taking
part in the Calabar Christmas Carnival, which we were asked by our link,
Shabaka Thomson (ex-Director of Notting Hill Carnival, London) to make. We’ve
been asked to produce 30 frontline costumes and four individual costumes.
They’ve asked us to make them elaborate and something that can stand out. So,
we’ve produced the costumes and we’re hoping they find them acceptable. We’ve
done as much as we could in London including the finishing. I actually
surprised myself the way we finished them.

Now, we
are a group that learn from other cultures; we’re from the different Caribbean
Islands with different cultures and living in London. For us, doing anything
for Africa is one of the greatest things to happen to us because we have to do
research into the particular African culture we want to work with to integrate
that culture into the carnival costumes.

Carnival is about celebrating your own culture; it can be anything but
it has to mean something and not just celebratory; not just colourful, but it
must mean something. And whoever we work for must take ownership of the
carnival or production.

From the
costumes, we expect you to appreciate what we’ve done; you will see that we put
everything we’ve got into it for your benefit. We tried to use the theme that
was given to us ‘Masks at Dawn’, and to bring it
in a way that is local. And we think that we’ve explored it. So, we will have
30 beautiful ladies to parade the costumes. But it’s the first time we’re doing
the costume; so we’re here to see how they will use our costumes. It’s new for
us. So, it will be a two-way learning process; but we’ve given them something
that will be spectacular.

Carnivals should be uniting people; carnivals mean different things to
different people from within their own cultures. Originally for us, it’s about
making a statement; it is making a stand for what you believe and about
individual customs and beliefs and over the years, with people coming over from
the Caribbean to the U.K. and vice versa, we now want to blend. So, we have a
lot of colours that are mixed up and stirred up together, to produce something
that is knitted together and wonderful. That is what carnival is all about.

What we
do with carnivals is to use what you have to exploit what you have to
understand the positiveness of your culture, your country and what you actually
want other people to see about you. When people come to a Nigerian carnival,
they should see what Nigerians are and not go away wondering if indeed it was
somewhere else they had been. If you’re having it in Calabar, it should have an
element of what Calabar is as well. So, it should have that edge. There should
be something unique about Calabar in it - the culture, the people and what else
besides. If in Lagos, the carnival should have that Lagos touch, something
different. That’s the way to take ownership of carnival for it to be different.

On the
social consciousness of carnivals, from the carnivals I’ve been involved in,
they are used to say what is going on currently, historically and even
politically. But this could be difficult in some countries because of political
culture prevailing at the time. But it’s like when you put something on stage
or theatre, it should make some statement.

Carnival is street theatre, street stage; it’s the same kind of way of
thinking, as long as it’s done tastefully and as long as you have control of
what you put out.

It may
offend some people; but sometimes you offend. You have to be aware of your
political climate and really see how far you can go. I won’t advise somebody to
just do that because of the political situation. But you can achieve it within
certain parametres so people respect you for what you have done. In some
countries, it’s easy; in some others, it’s not. You just have to be very
careful how you thread.

Sally (yet to get the full names; have asked Lilian
to send), an educational counsellor

We have a carnival costume band in Tottenham, London.
I think we evolved with Peoples World carnival Band. We started making costumes
for Notting Hill Carnival and other events locally. And over the years, we
realised that we’re opening a need for young people. The unique thing was that
most of the time we found that most of our young people were sometimes second,
third, fourth generation British black children, who know very little about
their home culture or history. Their cultures are being diluted and their
families are not close together as they should be in their own cultures back
home. And there’s also the problem with absentee fathers. I’m not trying to say
it’s the only reason for the problem, but there’s a dilution of the cultures
and the things that people do together.

So, what
we do is work all year round with young people like bicycle maintenance, help
them write CVs, introduce skills, help them look for jobs; there are all kinds
of work we do with them. We try to teach them to be as good as they can be –
the positive aspect of life – we make them learn something and keep it real.
And because of the problem we have locally; well, globally now, I guess, in
terms of the gang culture and little value for life – young people getting into
fight and killing each other, we’re determined that we’ll let them blossom.

So,
through the medium of costume-making, you can engage them in other things. One
of the main things that we do is to make them learn the world around them or
about the history of their respective countries through costume-making so they
could have a bit more understanding of their cultures. For instance, in one of
our events, we had ‘United in Rhythm’,
using the music and colours from the different countries as highlights.

So, for
people from St. Lucia, Dominican Republic, we had Zooks; from Jamaica, we had
reggae; highlife for the African young people and jungle music for young, black
people in London, also. They also had the colours of their countries’ flags as
costumes; it was subtly political as well, but not in your face politics.

It was to help young people recognise the cultures
that they come from -- from their flags to their music and more importantly,
they had to learn about somebody else’s culture, too.

At
Peoples World, it’s like a family. We celebrated our 30 years recently, and it
was about freedom, freedom of speech, of the elements, of blue. We don’t want
to harp on the slavery issue; we recognise it; we had it. But we want to move
on and young people learnt about slavery but they also learnt about freedom.
They don’t have to be disenfranchised. The riots that happened in Tottenham
were about a feeling of injustice, a failing of government.

I think,
the fact that our name is Peoples World gives us that international flavour,
feel about it. So, at Calabar Christmas Carnival, you will be expecting
fabulous costumes, and a kind of marriage of understanding – a two-way process
of understanding people and hopefully find a middle ground. We’re working with
Décor, which makes the costumes. We’ve taken our cue from the theme ‘Masks
at Dawn’ and we’ve taken our perception of that to produce
very glamourous costumes. You can be sure of that. I hope we can run with that
in spite of the politics!

Now,
we’re involved in the biggest carnival in Europe as the fifth element in the
Notting Hill Carnival in which people don’t appreciate the amount of work that
goes into it. But we work pretty much against the background of so much
restriction from the government – ‘oh, you can’t do this’; ‘oh, you have to
close early’; ‘oh, you can’t be this loud!’; ‘oh, you can’t use this road’.

So, it’s
kind of hard to always keep it sterile even when we always resist those
restrictions because the carnival is about people taking to the streets and not
used to being restriction to where they can be or how much noise they can make.
Unfortunately, there’s so much government machinery involved in policing people
and cleaning streets. We have the pressure of having the biggest number of
people and the loudest noise during the carnival.

I think
that instead of policing us so much, they should be glad. In 2003, they said 93
million pounds came to London over the period of Notting Hill Carnival alone
for airlines and hotels. It’s the biggest tourism event in the country! People around the world look forward to the carnival and
we’re very much down-played. So, why are we being treated so shabbily when
others make all the money? Sponsors come in guardedly.

But you
know, carnivals are not just about making glamour and glitz; not just to get
drunk and having fun. It should be a celebration of something, a commemoration
of something. Unfortunately, the Rio Carnival is diluted so much and is more
about funfair. Carnival must have content and it must be relevant to you! It’s
your cultural thing and about recycling and regeneration, which can be made as
its rule of engagement. It has to be about something locally produced, recycled
material. I don’t know the politics around this carnival, but it should be
something about sustainability, regeneration. Those judging should be looking
for something locally produced. Is it something that is giving back to the
community?

I don’t
know how you work here, but it could be about inviting church groups or faith
groups to make one band. That will be a challenge because carnivals are about
uniting people! It could be about resisting sectarianism, you know. Or they
want local school children to come together and select them to get a place in
the carnival band. But these are things to factor into a carnival to make more
meaning out of it rather than just fun. I think these possibilities could make
it much bigger and like a household event.

You look
at the Rio Carnival and people are going by half naked in bikinis. What message
is that really saying? You just go mad and enjoy yourself. You should think how
to add to that and what value to derive from it.

Sunday, 16 December 2012

‘My Lord, we, the ordinary folks of Oputeland, caught
in the trap of war at dawn, were robbed of our quiet night, and the prospect of
our seeing daylight again seemed a mirage. We strained our ears very hard to
hear the kernel of the dispute across the table. But we could neither make head
or tail out of it. Shouldn’t an egg be broken on its
head or not? Or indeed, should it be eaten in its yolk or be allowed to hatch
and watch the chick grow into a cockerel that would announce the break of yet
another day?

‘At first, we were amused and thought the whole
argument stupid. My Lord, why should grown-up men engage in such mindless
frivolity when the state lay prostrate from lack of apparent leadership? Do
they not have better things to talk about all day at the Presidential Palace?
But soon our amusement turned into bewilderment when the ugliness of the
situation began to dawn on us. Little did we know that at the seemingly
harmless beginning of that stupid argument eight years ago, a hole had been
blown into the hull of our canoe, and the water was merely rising to ankle
depth. It was indeed a time when sensible men would begin to bail out the water
to stop the canoe from capsizing and drowning the rest of us in it.

‘We the ordinary folks of Oputeland who saw the
futility of the proceedings at the Palace did not have a voice strong enough to
shout down the madness. We should have told them to put out the crackling
embers so our only hut made of thatch roof would not be consumed in the
conflagration soon to erupt and engulf us all.

‘Well, we could not stop those who claimed to rule us
from what had become an obvious madness at ego-trip. They could not restrain
themselves either. Nobody could, not even their international friends, who
always expect the worse of us so they could lend a hand one way or the other to
facilitate our doom. Soon the drums of war began to beat; blood began to boil
in the veins of young men soon recruited to amplify the friction.

‘Erovie, which occupied the throne, insisted it was its
birth right to continue to do so. But Urhuto disagreed. It argued that they
also have a right to the Palace pie. That it should be given a chance to share
the cake of state already baked by international oil companies operating in the
land for which Erovie has had more than a fair share over the years, and
largely for their own benefits. They argued that there was a skewed logic to
the balance of power in Oputeland in favour of Erovie, and that things must
change one way or the other.

‘Urhuto argued that since Erovie had monopolised power
since independence and produced successive leaders ever since, Oputeland had
been the worse for it and that no meaningful development had come to lift the
majority of the people from abject poverty. For them, a time had come for a
change of guard so others could project their ideas for the good of the
commonwealth. But Erovie insisted on clinging onto power and kept promising to
do things better.

‘The rest as they say, my Lord, is now bitter history
as this respected Panel and Oputeland already know.’

At that moment of
my submission, I could not restrain the tears that had welled up and kept
flowing after my opening. My pregnancy in its advanced stage hung hugely in
front of me, and I hug it with both arms. The Reconciliation Panel chairman, a
retired clergyman with a gentle soul, asked me to sit down to recollect myself.
I sat and wept freely. My two sisters, who sat on either side of me, just held
me close and rocked me in their arms.

In fairness, they
had warned me of the danger of exposing myself to the whole world by testifying
at the Panel set up to reconcile all those aggrieved as a result of the
fratricidal war that raged over our country for eight long years. The war
ruined everything – lives, careers and whatever development efforts we
had made since independence 40 odds years ago.

My two sisters
had feared that testifying at my advanced stage of pregnancy would affect me
and might even put my child in grave danger. We had all been witnesses to the
emotional outpouring the Panel had wrought in many who had gone before to
testify. Every day we listened to the multiple atrocities the war wreaked on
innocent people; how their lives were turned into what they were not and its
scares deeply branded. They were tales of woes, tales of a people gravely
dehumanised and senselessly slaughtered just to assuage other people’s greed for power. The ferocity of the war was
something we could not forget; it branded itself so deeply into our soul and
became the demon we must exorcise if we were to move forward. This Panel seemed
the perfect arena for such exorcism. I couldn’t fail
to take advantage of it.

But my sisters
had wondered what I stood to gain by telling the whole world my private shame
and tragedy at having suffered unfairly and unjustly in a war I did not cause
but from which I suffered so much violence?

But I disagreed
with them. What do they know? They were well outside the country studying when
our war raged; they had no idea what it was, what we suffered, how we survived
it. So, I pointed out to them that silence wasn’t the
best option either even in the most shameful situations, even though you happen
to be at the receiving end as the innocent victim. That indeed, I was never the
one that started the fire that consumed me; and that if nothing else, my shame
was the collective shame of our nation, of Oputeland, and of those whose greed
and inordinate quest for power for its own sake dragged us into a senseless
war.

Indeed, what good
has Erovie’s long stay in power brought to Oputeland? The country
still remained backward and undeveloped. In spite of the vast natural and
material wealth Oputeland is blessed with, there is still hunger, poverty,
diseases, joblessness and life remains brutish for a vast majority of the
people. Only a handful of the rogues in power are entitled to the mineral
wealth of my land. So, why would I not expose the tragedy their greed brought
us? Why should they rest easy in their inhumanity to the rest of us?

Moreover, women
suffered so much during the war; yes, women like me and many others who bore
the brunt of a war they did not cause. The men made us see and experience
unspeakable evils and silence wasn’t an option for
most of us who must poke fingers of innocence at their bloodied eyes.

I reminded my
sisters that the collective silence of women has always been the trump card
held up by cowardly, beastly men to perpetuate all forms of evils against
womenfolk all over the world in crises situations, especially in Africa’s conflict situations. I reminded them that men rape
women and still have the effrontery to charge them for sexual provocation; they
prostitute women and charge them for waywardness. Men sell us to other men and
shamelessly collect what they call bride price in the name of marriage and then
they traffic us for their profit. Men imprison women in their kitchens and
frivolously engage in senseless horse-trading in the name of politics, of
divide and rule and fan embers of vain nationalism and virulent ethnic
cleansing. Finally, I told them that men circumcise women to tame what they
call women’s disruptive passion so they could have a bursting
harem to flatter their masculine vanity!

It was all so
unfair, I cried out to my sisters. Why? Because we have not mustered the guts
to spill it out on men’s faces and made them eat their sordid vomit. I told
my sisters that women had kept silent for far too long so much so that we have
had our hairs shaven in our absence!

I intimated my
two sisters that all mothers before us failed us by their uncommon acquiescence
and that they were too shy and timid to ask uncomfortable questions that are at
the heart of women’s unfair share of woes in our land, and elsewhere. But
that we must begin to ask the hard questions we had until now failed to ask if
only to smash the balls of malefolk, who loath the collapse of the status quo.
Indeed, women must begin to ask the whys of their lives and situations. And if
nobody did, I firmly told them, I was volunteering to ask those questions
publicly, starting from this Panel. In any case, I wasn’t about to allow my sisters restrain me from doing
what I needed to do: go public with the collective shame of Oputeland! For in
my shame and the suffering that the people of Oputeland went through during the
war lay whatever redemption there was ever to be gained. So, we could finally
say, ‘never again’, and a mark of
a new awakening in our land.

Just then, the
Panel chairman’s gavel banged. I was jolted back into reality from my
reflections. I took a deep breath in and braced myself for the rest of my
testimony before the Panel. ‘Will Emamezi resume her
testimony, please? His Lordship’s voice was gently
prodding. ‘I’m sure she has regained
sufficient calm to continue. We emphasise here at this Panel that nothing must
be held back so that the attempt at national reconciliation and healing can be
total.’ Then he signalled me to continue.

‘As you all know, my Lord’, I
started in a clear voice. ‘Women are an international
property. They have no fixed abode or community, no known boundary and creed of
their own to hold. They go wherever the men in their lives say they should go.
It is the men who fan the embers of hatred, of nationalism, of tribe and religion.
Women, like the chameleon, blend in easily to wherever they find themselves and
are easily assimilated into their host communities or even beliefs. But my
Lord, we mother the world and the men in it! Yet women are the first
victims and targets of men’s madness after they had
unleashed violence on the world.

‘Yet we know that the birth pangs of a woman in labour
or the first screams of a newborn as he gulps air into his lungs transcend any
known boundaries or beliefs. Knowing what it is to bring a child into the
world, women are careful not to waste life on the altar of some senseless pride
and defence of faceless, blind beliefs or tribal identity. We, women, protect
life with all we have, my Lord, and do not waste it the way men do in quest of
vain heroism.

‘What do men care, anyway? Their contribution to life
is, at best, one long thrust, a violent spasm of lust and ill-digested climax,
a mad quest to conquer some feminine weakling that burn itself out even before
it starts. To most men, to stand between a woman’s thighs
is a matter of pride, mere ego-trip, a reassurance of a flagging virility.
Life, the making and preserving of life, is of least consideration.

‘The making of a life amounts to very little to most
men when stirred to war to spill blood. So, Oputeland went to war – with Erovie pitched against Urhuto. Suddenly,
darkness fell on the land.

‘We live on the small border town of Egelunu. It became
the first theatre of war, the fierce battleground. Urhuto launched the first
offensive and caught Erovie off-guard in the attack. Erovie had to beat a hasty
retreat as Urhuto pushed them back to the periphery of the Palace city. It
happened so quickly Egelunu found itself under rebel enemy control before they
realised it. It happened one early dawn. I was still 14 then, and lying on my
bed. Our mother’s room was just across the living room, her door
standing slightly ajar.

‘Then we heard footsteps running and voices barking
orders from across the street. Our mother hurried across to us in our room and
we hurdled together in a corner, too terrified to ask questions. Then the guns
began to crackle, and the bombs began to boom. There was wailing in the air and
thunder-clap and sheer horror let upon our world. It was just too terrifying
for words.

‘“Oh, Ozaudu!”’mother wailed.

‘Ozaudu was our elder brother; he had gone to join the
heady campaign on the side of Erovie. He just left home one day and we began to
see him speaking as the head of Erovie campaign teams. The pain on mother’s face at that dark dawn told of a mother suffering
the loss of a son still alive. It was a war that she didn’t understand but which she was certain would soon
consume her son. We felt her pain, too. We did not know if we were going to see
him again. The guns sounded so close and so loud we felt nobody would escape.

‘Hard banging on our door; we froze. We thought our end
had come. Soldiers with big guns broke down our door and burst into our room
and looked at us with bloodshot eyes. They pulled mother away from us, me and my
youngest sister. One of the soldiers pushed my sister to the parlour and shut
the room door behind us; it was just the two of us. Dead with fright, I
followed his motions dumbly with eyes popping off their sockets.

‘He leaned his gun to the wall. Then he began to
unbuckle his belt, then his fly came loose. Soon, the khaki uniform slipped to
the floor, and he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me back up against my bed.
I felt a dumb daze as he violated my tender body with his animal fury. I felt
the horror and brutality of his evil act from far away, my mind already numbed
from the abomination. I felt so far removed from the scene of my violation, as
if my body was mindless, as if my body belonged to someone else. Indeed, it
just wasn’t me. How could it be me, stretched out on the bed
with some beast shoving daggers between my thighs? I felt sorry for those
thighs, whoever had them.

‘Just then, in my faraway consciousness, I heard noises
and the single scream of a woman’s voice. “Nooooo!” I screamed
back in response in my unconscious mind and then I blanked out.

‘It was a long time laterbefore I came to. There was an eerie feeling in the
air. I felt raw between my legs, as if a deep cut had developed there on its
own. Then I opened the door and saw Mother lying on the floor in a pool of her
blood, a white cloth covered her from her head to her feet. She had been shot,
apparently, for not producing her son Ozaudu. Bitter tears fell from my eyes...”

A murmur of grief
swept through the Old Senate Chambers, where the Panel was sitting. Many
people, especially women, dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs. Even the Panel
chairman lowered his head in apparent grief. In all my life, I had never
produced such sobering effect on anyone let alone such a huge gathering.
Somehow, an inner thrill coursed through my being. I felt alive again, bound
together by a common feeling of fellowship with my countrymen and women. I had
not made a mistake by coming to testify after all. That touch of human
compassion had not completely died out in my country yet; a measure of
redemption could still be hoped for. I felt good at the reaction my narration
was having on my people. This overflowing feeling of catharsis after the tragic
event of our recent past meant we still had a chance at rebuilding all we had
lost and the possibility of strengthening our nation-state, provided, of
course, we would be willing to guard against the mistakes of the past that
plunged us into war. That way would our nation begin to emerge from the ashes of
self-hate and pursuit of half-digested ideologues – be they religious, tribal or egoistic.

‘People, let there be order in the house!’ the chairman intervened as murmuring had overtaken
the chamber with neighbour talking to neighbour about my family’s travail and weighing it against their own tragedies.
Indeed, the chamber had seen many such narrations of the different facets of
the war. Both old and young, soldiers and officers, commoners and nobles alike,
men and women, vanquished and victors; it had been a motley of national
outpouring of the wrongs done in the heat of war.

‘Emamezi has given us food for thought. But let’s be patient to hear her out as we’ve been doing to all the others and those yet to
testify. Hers will be the final one for today.’

‘Needless to say that the next few days and weeks,’ I began again, ‘seemed to last
forever. For me it was an endless nightmare; I had no idea if I was ever going
to wake up or sleep forever. I walked about in a dumb daze. When it seemed as
though I had begun to grasp the reality of my surrounding, symptoms of early
pregnancy appeared. Diagnosis soon confirmed it. What was worse, I had
gonorrhoea to the bargain! I fervently prayed for the earth to open up and
swallow me. But whatever higher being I was praying to probably didn’t have ears to hear or was too busy sorting out our
war record to answer me.

‘Well, so much for being an innocent bystander! I got
the bigger beating than the actual actors in our war. Eventually, I got treated
of the gonorrhoea and braced myself for nine months of pregnancy. My mother’s sister, Ugbeta, may God continue to bless her soul,
took two of us in. She stood by me all through my uncommon ordeal even when her
husband thought it was madness for me to keep the pregnancy and deliver a
bastard as a sad reminder of the war. But my aunt insisted.

‘“It’s a human life we’re talking
about here,’ I overheard her telling her husband heatedly one
night. “Nobody knows why God allowed it to happen at this
terrible time. We owe the unborn child a duty to protect it, not to mention
Emamezi. A silly mistake could cost us two more lives; we’ve lost one already from which we’re yet to recover. I’m not
sure I am ready for another tragedy. So please, let her be. God will see us
through these difficult times”

‘I did not hear them argue again on my account. And so,
that was how nine long and dreary months rolled by without much incident. By
now we had been left far behind in the theatre of war as Urhuto chased Erovie
to the Palace city gates. Nevertheless, I was barely aware of my surrounding
those nine long months. I mainly slept through them. One quiet night, nurses in
white uniforms urged me to push hard. I pushed as they instructed and a shrill
scream burst forth between my thighs. It was a baby boy.’

There was a loud
murmur in the chamber from my captive audience. I stopped and surveyed the
faces. Was it the murmur of relief that I was finally delivered safely or
approval that the child was a boy? Would my audience have expressed as much pleasure
if my baby was a girl? I could hardly figure it out. So I continued my story.

‘Everyday, I examined my boy’s features very closely and critically. I meant to see
something of the father I would never know nor recognise, a father my son would
never know, too. Yes, he looked lovely and even handsome. Clearly, he didn’t look like anyone in my family, which meant he looked
every inch like his father. And I often wonder, could anyone with the slightest
claim to handsomeness as my son was turning out to be, be so low and beastly as
to take advantage of a defenceless, helpless girl and put her in a precarious
position?

‘I sought desperately to think of my son’s father in a less hideous manner. But I couldn’t; the pain of my brutal violation was too deep to
gloss over by the coming of a child. Moreover, I had a boy child to bring up
all alone without the slightest idea who the father was – certainly not a cheering prospect. Yet I loved my boy
so much, and through him, inexplicably, I loved whoever the father was. Mine
was a pain-child, no doubt. And I ought to hate the father for making my life
such miserable hell. But I really couldn’t bring myself
to hating him. How could I hate my boy’s father and
not extend the same dark emotions towards my boy?

‘I remember that dark night; I remember the dark pain
and brutal violation. I remember also that it was the unfortunate night I was
turned into a woman, although an unwilling one by an unknown soldier. Was that
pain in vain? No; all I know is that a certain night of dark emotions yielded
into my laps a life demanding attention. Then I remembered also that a war was
going on. And war makes ordinary men mad; and men at war claim booties in the
women they meet; I was one such booty.

‘Was I rationalising my love for my boy’s father? Perhaps so; and are we, the ordinary folks
of Oputeland, not the actual foot soldiers used by the generals and the
politicians as ladders to climb to their exalted positions? It was unfortunate
that our rulers have the mastery of turning ordinary folks against themselves.
Perhaps, we would have less rancour in our nation if the foot soldiers should
turn the guns bought with tax-payers’ money against
the politicians and the generals instead of at ordinary soldiers on both sides
of the divide…’

‘Will Emamezi stick strictly to narrating her
experience rather than engage in revolutionary talk, please?’ The chairman was far from being gentle this time.
There was indeterminate buzz in the hall. I was happy I held the audience in
the spells of my testimony. The chairman banged his gavel for order. But it
took a while before the hall quietened down. I felt I had made my point
sufficiently enough; I didn’t want to engage the
chairman further on the revolutionary charge.

‘The next two and a half years were rather uneventful.
Egelunu was far behind the war front. But there was no sign of victory for
either side. I took care to nurse my son meanwhile. But that was not to be for
long. Erovie, after beating a retreat and having taken a severe beating at the
hands of the advancing forces of Urhuto, soon regrouped strongly again just
outside the Palace city. Then they began to repel Urhuto forces. The battle, we
learnt, was fierce and bloody. Erovie had engaged the services of foreign
mercenaries and acquired sophisticated military hardware. Soon, Urhuto was
outmatched and a retreat became inevitable for them. Erovie was hot on their
heels as they pursued them beyond our boundary town of Egelunu and deep into
Urhuto territory.

‘So, once again, Erovie forces were in control of
Erovie towns and cities, including some cities in Urhuto. But the occupying
soldiers would be soldiers. Just like the invading Urhuto soldiers of over two
years before them, the liberating soldiers of Erovie also had their ready booties
to pick. Many young women in Egelunu suffered the same brutal fate – rape and forceful appropriation! Once again, I was
among those the liberating soldiers picked on to satiate their war ravaged,
lustful appetite. Once again also, I became pregnant. Once again, it was a boy
child that I had’.

‘Aaahhh!’ went the
murmur in the hall.

‘So, two boys from the same womb from two dramatic
encounters with two beastly men in grim opposition to each other, without the
slightest knowledge of what they had done. They were my first contact with men
on the sexual front. Until those encounters, I only had vague ideas how babies
were made. Nevertheless and thanks to our war, here was I, a virgin, being made
into a woman and a mother in the most unromantic manner. What was more, I had
no say in the matter; just the blind lust of some depraved, unknown soldiers
out to still the raging blood in their virulent veins. I just couldn’t believe my luck, if one could call it by that name!

‘But it was all too real to be true. To play host to
two enemy baby boys in one womb in the course of one war is, to put it mildly,
the height of motherhood. The war, it seemed, was fought right in my womb! For
two enemy soldiers to claim their war booties in my womb without even knowing it
must be a fantastic joke; but this wasn’t a joke at
all. This was my life; it is my life!

‘And by now you may be wondering, ‘whose child is she carrying this time?’ Of course, the war has long ended. ‘Is she married to some decent Oputeland man now?’ The answer, dear people, is no; not Oputeland man in
your wildest dream! I’d seen enough of them up close and ugly to want in
again. But, ‘is the man decent?’ I dare say,
yes; he’s Ugandan, a soldier, and a peacekeeper at that!’

A wave of murmur again swept through the hall. The
panel chairman sat back deep in his chair, relaxed now, his gavel lying idly on
the table.

‘Colonel Obote was in the Ugandan troupe that helped
broker the peace deal that eventually put an end to the self-inflicted war as
part of the African Peace-keeping Mission,’ I informed my
audience, and pointed him out in the hall; he took a bow. And there were
cat-calls from all over. ‘Colonel Obote is a gentleman. Desperation for food and
provision drove me into his arms. He treated me like a real woman unlike what
my fellow countrymen made me suffer in their blind quest for wrong-headed
nationalism and tribalism. The childhood sweetheart our war robbed me of I have
been able to find in his arms. He took me for what I am; he’s never critical of my past, raw as it seems. His
understanding sometimes makes me cry.

A month ago, I went for a test. I had prayed fervently
that my baby would be a girl. My violent meeting with men during our futile war
produced two boys, two opposing soldiers, if you like. It was understandable
that violence should sow potential seeds of violence. Now there is peace. And I
felt I needed now the tampering spirit of a girl child, a borderless citizen of
the world, ready to soothe the raging soul of our troubled world. For once, my
prayer was not in vain. What can I say? I invite you all to our wedding in
Uganda in two months’ time…’

My voice was drowned out by the clapping and whistling
and tears of joy in the hall. Even the Panel chairman forgot to use his gavel
this time to bring order...